THE MICRO-ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Abstract

In this article I offer an unfashionably ideological critique. I argue that, in the USA, ideology now appears in the form of the narratives that capitalism tells itself about itself, in particular at sites of commodity consumption. I examine three everyday sites in which capitalism constructs an Imaginary version of itself as it exhorts contemporary consumers to consume ethically: during a visit to a Target Superstore; on an overnight stay in a hotel room; and while purchasing a bag of fair trade coffee. In these moments and at these sites, corporations instruct us in the ‘ethical’ use of their commodities, and obeying those instructions promotes us to the rank of ‘consumer activist’. This article attempts to explain how this ‘ethical consumption’ – a form of what I call ‘micro-ethics’ – has displaced more social, or ‘macro’, forms of ethical action. To make my case, I argue that globalized capitalism denies many of us the social coordinates, or handholds, that are necessary if we are to feel that we can act meaningfully within the Symbolic Order, or social reality itself. This ‘deworlding’ effect, as Alain Badiou calls it, encourages us to reject social forms of ethical and political life and to retreat to a careful policing of the Imaginary boundaries of our ‘inner selves’ instead. In other words, global capitalism logically produces, as its own ideological support and supplement, a micro-ethics that attends only to what the single person can do, and only within the realm of consumption. We participate in this fantasy version of ‘eco-capitalism’ that advertising, publicity and other discourses establish to the extent that we accept consumption as the ultimate horizon of our ability to intervene in problems of ecological depredation and the exploitation of labour in the First and Third Worlds.

Keywords:

• ethics
• anti-consumerism
• capitalism
• ideology
• critique

Notes

1. To see this idea worked through, refer to Fukuyama (2006).

2. For recent considerations of what communism might mean in the present, refer to Douzinas and Žižek (2010).

3. This slogan (‘Versatile Solutions’) is Tyler Durden's ironic description of Ikea's philosophy in the film Fight Club (1999).

4. See, for example, the special issue of Cultural Studies devoted to anti-consumerism: Cultural Studies, vol. 22, no. 5, September 2008, as well as Kim Humphrey (2010), Soper et al. (2009), Schwartz (2010), Princen et al. (2002), among others.

5. I understand the differences between the Real, the Symbolic Order, the Imaginary, and ‘reality’ as one of Lacan's translators, Alan Sheridan, describes them. He writes: ‘This Lacanian concept of the ‘real’ is not to be confused with reality, which is perfectly knowable’ (x). He adds that the Real is ‘that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached but never grasped’ (x). Unlike the Real, reality coincides with Lacan's notion of the Symbolic Order. See Sheridan (1977).

6. For an interesting analysis of how improving the efficiency of consumption leads to more, not less consumption, see Princen et al. (2002) and Jack Manno (2002).